[QUOTE]Originally posted by CarneVaca
Second, I'm a little taken aback at the hostility toward Anne Heche. What really makes her such a prime candidate for this kind of attack? (QUOTE)
I think Anne Heche sends people's phony alerts into overdrive. Although I have many times wrongly gauged the taste and sense of the American public (Milli Vanilli anyone ?), in general, the public can see an out and out fraud when it rears it's ugly head.
Unfortunately, most people have pegged her for the opportunistic attention sponge she is.
Case in point - a tell all memoir when she was famous for all of five minutes ? She was really famous for who she was sleeping with, not for her art. She was grabbing all she could get in her brief fifteen minutes. Plus, splashing her intimate relationship all over the press was in questionable taste and it completely eclipsed her career. It's not even a gay thing. Melissa Etheridge has an actress girlfriend and they aren't giving joint interviews and hooting all over about their eternal love after knowing each other for 6 months. Such hoopla is suspect.
The American public seems to have a certain amount of Goodwill for celebrities. And it seems linked to their talent. Elizabeth Taylor can get away with absolutely anything. For one thing, she has been around forever. For another, she was a world class performer. Thirdly, the tragedies she has overcome have been epic (near death illnesses, being widowed, etc.). There are others in the same category - Liza Minnelli, and even our Stevie have had well documented personal problems, that in light of their talents are forgiven. Significant artists are somehow expected to be flawed and challenged. If you are "special" enough, you are not tossed off the shrine.
People like Nick Nolte and Robert Downey Jr. seem to teeter forever on the precipice. They are just talented enough to still work and not lose their credibility entirely. But, I digress.
Ultimately, Heche-Lafoon gives people the creeps... the wacky "eternal love" after a few months, the "disappearance breakdown", the flip-flop sexuality. Ultimately, it was the need to trumpet the whole saga to a half interested public in print and on Barbara Walters that sent me over the edge. It's cheap, it's tawdry, and I think at the end of the day it was all a big desperate act to get noticed. I pity the kid and the clueless husband.
Off the soapbox for now !
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